Saturday, September 12, 2009

Pandora Now Limits to 40 Hours

For the last two years, For Pandora has been on the bubble of legality. In their defense, they were and still are doing their best to be legal by signing contracts with big music. While they were able to exit this state of limbo and once again be officially legal, their recent renegotiation has a significantly bad clause.

On July, 7th, 2009, Pandora contract renegotiation includes a clause that free accounts can only listen to music for 40 hours per month. After you have listened to 40 hours of music in a month, you can pay $1 for unlimited music for the remainder of the month. While this is not that much money (it is at most $12 a year), I will be taking the path of least resistance.

I have heard great things about Last.fm and their free accounts get to listen to an unlimited amount of music. I just created my account and started listening as I started this blog post.

I heard about Pandora's new limitation last night. I did not listen to music that much this summer, but I must be listening to lots of music at school because I only have 10 hours left for this month. Sorry Pandora, I have enjoyed the last two years of music, but you are no longer the number one, personalized, online radio station.

UPDATE:
It has not even been a whole day since I switched from Pandora to Last.fm and I can already tell the Last.fm is way better. The best feature of Last.fm is the ability to play whatever song you want (there my be some kind of limits to this, but I have not found any yet).